Linux - EnterpriseThis forum is for all items relating to using Linux in the Enterprise.

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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

That all depends on what you want from your distro. Both are fine distributions as are many others like Ubuntu or any other Debian based or Gentoo or Slackware... So tell us more about how you want to use your system.

Hi inescapeableus,
for my opinion, you choose Linux because of you the price, the stability, the performance and the most important issue which is support (support break into human and software repository).

For myself redhat/centos have superior performance but the price is expensive, without commercial support it can be paintful to setup particular services. Example I'd waste 2 days to setup pykota services in my Server just because of their repository is small.

Suse have better GUI and for myself novell have much more ready product on hand, include Windows & Linux. It is quite good however their repository still not huge enough if you want to try some odd application or services. And, for me the performance is bad.

Ubuntu, which is I recommend most because it offer very huge repository, include commercial & community. Most of the softwares I can simply apt-get it.

All of them is capable to become server, but I'll say Ubuntu is the easiest OS for you if you have no plan to purchase commercial support.

I too was faced with the same choice recently.
I have gone with Redhat/Centos as most enterprise software will run without too much hassle.
I have been running this way now for 3 months and very happy with it.

To go into more depth, this is going to be a Enterprise wide deployment. Replacing aging SPARC servers running Solaris, and even some incompetent SCO Openserver. I have had a very broad experience to both and I am judging based on commercial support and the quality of such. I feel very favorable to Redhat but I am interested in other commercial supported deployments.

I have openSuSE installed on my laptop and desktop. I installed Fedora Core 6 on an old laptop just to play with it. I find the YaST2 configuration modules to be superior to the system-config-* modules in Fedora Core. Also, the SuSE firewall allows you to assign network devices to certain zones. So you can easily have the internet connected NIC locked down and allow more services open on the LAN interface. You don't have to manually write a script of iptables commands. ( Note, that I only have one interface on the Fedora Core laptop. If having more that one interface results in a different dialog, or another dialog, I simply haven't seen that then.

Fedora core uses selinux whereas SuSE uses AppArmor. Novel is a supporter of xen, so it may have better xen support.
Also, the SuSE xgl based desktop is a plus for the desktop. The SuSE zen installer from SuSE 10.1 & 10.2 are dogs. It was replaced with in openSuSE 10.3. The new system is alot faster. It uses less resources so the 10.3 version seems to run faster.

Good Luck! A lot depends on what you are more familiar with.

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You posted your last message after I started typing my response. I guess my post was more personal desktop oriented then server oriented.

Thank you for your input. I am rather impartial to the distribution tools as I typically prefer a manual means. Xen virtualization is a technology that I am carefully reviewing, as it progresses I may be inclined to retire an aging VMware installation. To press even further, I have concluded a lot of non-OSS parties distribute packages designed for RHEL. At this point I may decide to continue with Redhat, provided there is no other significant argument in SUSE's case.

As well to touch base with SELinux and AppArmour I am in favor of SELinux for reasons beyond the scope of this post.